child sexual abuse Posts

“No Touch” A picture book on child sexual abuse ( CSA)

Not a day goes by without the morning newspapers reporting the horrendous sexual attacks upon children. It is frightening and deeply disturbing. In a manner of speaking CSA ( child sexual abuse) has replaced the news about dowry deaths which used to fill the papers in the 1980s.

It becomes extremely difficult to discuss child sexual abuse particularly in a society like India where any conversation remotely linked to sex is considered moral taboo. It is not uncommon to hear of young couples getting married and clueless about how babies are born! In such a scenario teaching a child to recognise and articulate uncomfortable scenarios which are probably in the purview of CSA becomes challenging. Hence a picture book like No Touch published by Scholastic India is relevant and useful.

In fact an innovative way of getting this book read has been by having copies of the book dropped off by book fairies on the Delhi metro.

Child sexual abuse is absolutely horrific and what is truly alarming is the perpetrators are mostly known to the children abused. There have been many concerted campaigns such as this animated video on child sexual abuse made in English and Hindi by CHILDLINEIndia. In 2014 noted filmmaker Pankaj Butalia published Dark Room: Child Sexuality in India with the hope to open this conversation outside of the specialized, academic circles. Another brilliant attempt was made by Scholastic India author Ken Spillman in his short story “A bubble of shared knowing”. After the December 2013 dastardly act of raping a young girl in Delhi the conversations about child sexual abuse and rape opened up and for the first time these filtered into public spaces and collective consciousnesses. As a result the case of writer and rape survivor Sohaila Abdulali who had been gang-raped in the 1980s began to be discussed once more. In fact she was brave enough to write about the incident in an NYT article “I Was Wounded; My Honor Wasn’t” ( 7 Jan 2013). A few months later she co-authored a forceful article in the Guardian asking for children to be made aware of rape and sexual assault, the discourse must be brought home. ( “To protect our children, we must talk to them about rape” 26 April 2013).

No Touch a picture book is a step in the right direction. The book needs to be read, shared and disseminated widely. These difficult conversations must be had in every household and schools.

No Touch published by Scholastic India. Hb. 2017 

3 August 2017 

Kiran Manral: Karmic Kids

kiran-manral-2Kiran Manral’s Karmic Kids: The Story of Parenting Nobody Told You! is a book of parenting advice she shared on her very popular blog in the first decade of her son’s life. She closed the blog once he turned ten. In her inimitable style of blending frankness, honesty, humour and an ability to laugh at herself too, Kiran Manral records the various stages of her brat’s life from infancy to a ten-year-old while sharing invaluable parenting tips. The most sensible advice that seems to be stressed in the book though never stated explicitly is motherhood and parenting does not come naturally. It needs to be learned on the job which is relentless and never ending. It is not necessarily the chore it can seem at times despite the sleepless nights, the anxiety in being responsible for a blob that slowly transforms into a little human being. It is rewarding and a pleasure and she would not want it any other way. She intersperses it with advice from various experts on parenting and caregiving of a child. It helps in bolstering the book instead of relegating as just one more memoir to the many in the market. By writing in this accessible style, Kiran is able to discuss a range of issues like child sexual abuse, co-sleeping with parents, helicopter parenting, discipline, sex-education for the children, sibling / rivalry, teaching children to be independent and empowered, etc. Her writing is forthright without being preachy, it is honest and humourous. It resonates with the readers for sharing parental anecdotes that seem to be universal in the challenges of bringing up children. The last time I read a sane and practical book on parenting within the Indian context were those written by Gouri Dange.

This is a fabulous book — highly recommended.  Good stuff!

Kiran Manral Karmic Kids: The Story of Parenting Nobody Told You! Hay House Publishers India, Delhi, 2015. Pb. pp. 250. Rs 299

Ayana Mathis, “Twelve Tribes of Hattie”

Ayana Mathis, “Twelve Tribes of Hattie”

Ayana Mathis, Twelve Tribes of HattieMy review of Ayana Mathis’s Twelve Tribes of Hattie has been published in the Hindu Literary Review. Online on 5 Oct 2013 and in print on 6 Oct 2013. Here is the link to the original url http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/historys-brood/article5200369.ece?homepage=true . It was titled “History’s Brood”. I am c&p the full text of the review below.) 

Hattie was stronger than Bell could ever be. She didn’t know how to tend to her children’s souls, but she fought to keep them alive and to keep herself alive. (p.217) … Fate had plucked Hattie out of Georgia to birth eleven children and establish them in the North, but she was only a child herself, utterly inadequate to the task she’d been given. (p.236)

The novel is about the “high yellow girl” Hattie Shepherd who began courting August when she was fifteen because he was a secret from her Mama and “because it thrilled her to go out with a country boy beneath her”.  They married when Hattie discovered she was pregnant with her twins, Philadelphia and Jubilee. Unfortunately it is 1925, before penicillin has been discovered and the infants succumb to pneumonia before they turn one. “Not a day went by that Hattie did not feel their absence in the world, the empty space where her children’s lives should have been.” The nine other children she goes on to have consider their mother to be cold and frosty, yet she finally learns to (according to Willie, the witch doctor) wrestle down her “restless soul”. Hattie’s tribe of twelve consists of her children and one grandchild in particular, Sala.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is fiction but set across sixty crucial years of North American history.  The story starts during Prohibition, slavery and racial segregation existed in Georgia to conclude in 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected President. Ayana Mathis sketches brilliantly the evangelical gatherings in the revival tents where Six delivers his first sermon, the blues-jazz music that Floyd plays, war in Vietnam that Franklin experiences firsthand, child sexual abuse that Billups keeps as a deep secret, Bell’s slide down the social ladder into deep poverty and her near brush with death due to consumption, and Cassie’s schizophrenia. Each chapter is told well. They are absorbing to read but what is disconcerting is that the stories remain like threads swirling around Hattie. This is where the Hagar myth that looms large in African-American literature resonates well. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, offered her Egyptian slave to her husband when she was barren. Hagar had Ishmael by Abraham. Later when Sarah had Isaiah, God promised Hagar that her son, Ishmael, would create a nation. Similarly Hattie’s children spread far and wide, across the nation and the social ladder to leave their mark.

It is not historical fiction but there are details in the novel that document history accurately – the revival tents for evangelical gatherings, discovery of Penicillin, the recognition that schizophrenia required medical treatment and not taking the patient to a religious gathering for the devil to be exorcised, the limitations of a witch doctor, the social acceptance of a black doctor as with Alice’s husband. Ayana Mathis is a powerful storyteller, ( the painful description of the dying twins or of Cassie’s schizophrenia or Bell’s tuberculosis slowly killing her) the chapters come together as a powerful novel and explains why Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club. Yet it is impossible to get away from the feeling that this is a brilliant product of a creative writing course. The sketches, the accuracy to detail, creation of atmosphere are powerful but the random use of minor character or even the sporadic appearance of the siblings does not make much sense.

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie Knopf Publishing House, Random House, Great Britain, 2013. Pb. Pp. 245 Rs. 550

5 Oct 2013 

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